Do you honestly believe the consumer market will want or even care about Maximo, LSF and the ops related tools for SoftLayer and OpenStack? I don't see how the stuff I have used with/for IBM has mass appeal outside the IT enterprise space.

it appears you didn't read my posts. as such, you're simply raging against a straw man of your making.with respect to a reasonably fast PCIe SSD with 256GB, we have http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-020-MX since VAT does not apply to North America, 300 pound sterling is just over $500

Yes, that's why I figured the price differential (about $1000 or so) accounts for the unique architecture of the Mac Pro. Read the first two of my posts in this thread. I stated my assumptions therein.

see my post on page 2.also, a slight correction: the Intel C600 family of chipsets might be better for the base model Xeon E5 than the Intel X79 chipset. the price delta would not be more than $150 between the two chipsets. As such, we haveIntel Xeon E5 1600-class CPU - $300Two Tahiti-based GPUs (Radeon HD 7800-class; 256-bit lanes) - $50012 GB RAM - $200Intel C600-based chipset - $550256GB SSD - $250If my math is correct, the total is $1800. The additional $1200 would...

- a motherboard with an Intel X79 chipset -- which I believe can support Xeon E5's -- costs around $400 http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P9X79_WS/http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/performance-chipsets/x79-express-chipset.html - the price of a 256GB SSD is around $250http://www.corsair.com/en/ssd/neutron-series-ssd/neutron-series-256gb-sata-3-6gbs-ssd.html so those two components would add $650 on top of the CPU + GPU + memory cost of $1000. that would leave...

With respect to the newly announced Mac Pro - An Intel Xeon E5 processor running at 3.7GHz is likely an Intel Xeon E5-1620 v2. Released last month, you can get the CPU for $300 retail http://ark.intel.com/products/75779/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-1620-v2-10M-Cache-3_70-GHz?q=Intel%20Xeon%20E5-1620%20v2 - The FirePro D300 is probably based off the Tahiti core which makes it equilvalent to the Radeon HD 7800 series of GPUs released back in late 2012. You can get a pair of...